Causation: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

by Stephen Mumford

Saying that T causes recovery is discouraged, perhaps because it is seen as making a metaphysical

is to assume that

there must be a single essence to something just because we use one word for it.

causal imposters.

And if an economy has received an increased money supply, we can infer that it will undergo further inflation.

what something is in the world rather than an explanation of the meanings of words.

knowledge just is, nothing more nor less, than justified true belief.

reduce causation away seems only workable if

thinking. What is behind this line of attack is the plausibility of a causal theory of

proprioception

fallacy of causal constancy.

This would be a kind of placebo effect.

The Grammar of Science (1911).

What one can show through statistics then seems largely to be dictated by what factors one assumes.

Fisher’s idea is the basis of the randomized controlled trial (RCT), which builds on J. S. Mill’s earlier method of difference.

The ‘treatment’ group gets bananas before their exams while the control group doesn’t. If the results are better among the treatment group than the control group, then we declare that bananas improve exam performance.

cocktail effect

Pearl calls a deep understanding of the situation.

old Bradford Hill criteria of causation, proposed by Sir Austin Bradford Hill in 1965. The suggestion was that to find causation (in epidemiology, in this case), one should look for nine factors: for example, the strength of association, its consistency, its temporal priority, the strength of a dose being proportional to strength of response, and so on.

Beebee, H., Hitchcock, C. and Menzies, P. (2009) The Oxford Handbook of Causation, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hoover, K. D. (2001) Causality in Macroeconomics, New York: Cambridge University Press.